People’s heads keep exploding for no good reason in I Am Your Beast and I’m very much onboard with it
Some of the reasons are good, to be fair
Strange Scaffold’s newly released FPS I Am Your Beast is very fun for quite a few reasons, but chief among them is a deep appreciation for the poetry of good videogame violence. I’m not using the big P word just to throw out an overly worthy comparison to something we might associate with craft or beauty, but as a nod toward the game’s playful application of what I previously called ‘a euphoric splurge of murderous game verbiage’ one morning where I had clearly eaten my wordy Weetabix. The way its hurled knives and curb stomps and inexplicable decapitations flow together have an assonant, almost Suessian quality to them.
But it’s also, well, just a bit like Mad Libs. You play as Harding, a man who’s mythical lethality is established very early on. The showing is there in the moment to moment, but the telling is conveyed through cute tricks like how everyone you meet is so deeply afraid of Harding that they loudly keep track of exactly what weapon he’s holding at all times. The Mad Libs comes in through the fact that you can draw Harding a route between A and B, and it’s a given that multiple heads are going to come unstuck from necks along the way. You’re sort of just casually filling in the verbs that seem the most fun to you in the moment. One of the verbs is ‘hornet’. Hornet is a verb now.
Here’s complaint, straight out the leftmost field, in which only the pettiest complaints blossom : the end level results screen is fucking awful. Completing a level gives you two buttons to click, both of which make me angry every time I have to interact with them. The first one restarts the same level you just finished, despite it gallivanting in the same screen real estate as would naturally house a ‘next level’ button. The other one says ‘exit’ on it, and takes you back to the level select menu - a deeply unsatisfying denouement. Hang on. Let me just reach into my bag of 99 bollocks and one point of constructive criticism to see if I have anything more to say about this and…no, no, it’s just bollocks.
That was petty of me, so here’s some reverse-pettiness: I love this game’s title so much, and I love it more the more I play. This is an incredibly well-written and acted game - so much so that you’ll come to savour what could have easily been unwelcome interruptions in between such kinetic, snackable stages. But the central theme here really carries things along. There’s a wonderfully-penned conversation early on about whether talented people should feel obligated to make use of those talents. You’re supposed to take it as a manipulative tactic on the villain’s part, I think, but it struck me as a sort of counterpoint to that Bojack bit about how most of us don’t even get to do a sort of watered-down, populist version of our dream jobs - a speech that sticks with me for reasons that I imagine are fairly obvious. I’ll take some existential longing in between my decapitations, sure!
It’s those decapitations, though, that tie everything together: the ripe, poppable cherries on top of the cake. Because as many verbs as Harding has at his disposable, very few of them should rightly cause this many head explosions at this kind of frequency. This is the second game I’ve written about today that I’d argue is both a homage and deconstruction in at different points, but you do need to adore something to strip it for parts, And I Am Your Beastm as I said up top, clearly deeply adores the specific and joyful poetry of making a man’s head just, flippin', not be there anymore for no especially good reason.
If you’re on the fence about this one, my main point of caution would be this: if you don’t like replaying levels repeatedly to hit higher scores, secret objectives, and generally hitting the sort of choreographed flows that come with high-level play, you might find it a little thin as a package. There’s also a touch of stiffness to the controls still that - while an improvement on the demo - hold the game back from the seamless joys of a more focused FPS. Still, it's a very nifty offering overall, I think.
Also, I’m not very good at writing about music so I generally avoid it - but this is my favourite soundtrack of the year, and it’s not even close.